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The Georgia Health Policy Center (GHPC), established in 1995, provides evidence-based research, program development and policy guidance on local, state and national levels to improve health status at the community level.

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Signature Tools

With more than 19 years of experience, the Georgia Health Policy Center focuses on solutions for today’s most complex health issues, including child health and well-being, health care reform, rural health, and more. The GHPC seeks policy solutions at local, state, and national levels; in public and private settings; and in alignment among all of these.

We use a systems perspective, in which problems in one system component (e.g., unhealthy eating) are understood in relation to other system components or to the overall system (e.g., food production and distribution systems, household economics and individual knowledge).

Communities, including workplace communities, are a critical place in the system where health is experienced and transferred. We find that community-based participatory approaches help us engage and learn from community members about what affects their health, while system thinking provides insights to design higher leverage policy changes to improve health.

Below is a selection of signature tools that we use in our work:

System Mapping and Modeling: Stock and flow maps are tools that can depict a system in a common visual language and allow people to see how things are connected, where the boundaries of the system are, and how feedback loops contribute to the complex dynamics that occur in real-life situations.

Meeting Design & Facilitation Tool: Developed by Dannemiller Tyson Associates, this highly participative approach provides a robust, highly effective and predictable set of processes to help organizations and communities identify and utilize their own internal abilities to grow up, to better lead, and to create the organizations and communities of their own choosing.